Computer networks have provided individuals, corporations, and governments with the means for transferring, sharing, and disseminating large amounts of information and data in digital form. Since the advent of the Internet, data communications has increased in volume and in ways previously unimagined.
An example of data being transferred is real-time video and/or audio. Either media is “packetized,” or converted, from an analog or digital form into a series of data packets that are capable of being transferred across various computer networks. Routers, servers, or other data communication devices are used to effect the data transfer. The media is said to emanate from a host server/computer to one or more client servers/computers.
For instance, a White House press conference occurring in Washington, D.C. may be viewed over the Internet by thousands of viewers watching on client computers or other devices. A single local, White House, host server is generally incapable of supporting all the clients at real-time video rates. Also, bottlenecks may occur at local, Washington D.C. routers supporting the packetized video/audio transfer from the host server to all the clients. To facilitate the high speed video data transfer for real-time video viewing, networks of redundant high-speed servers and routers operating around the Internet have had reasonably good success.
Computer network systems often contain routers, firewalls, proxy servers, and other devices that act to disguise or alter the network addresses of various clients and servers. These devices disguising or altering the network addresses do so in order to enhance the security or performance of the network or, in many cases, to make possible the interoperation of computer networks that use addresses that are incompatible for some reason.
A common scenario is a corporate network containing 100 computers using network addresses 10.0.0.1 through 10.0.0.100, using the TCP/IP network protocols. These numbers are used as “private” network addresses, and the public TCP/IP Internet does not route data packets to these private network addresses. In this scenario, the corporation installs one or more routers, firewalls, network address translators (NATs), proxy servers, or other address translation device (ATD) which are configured such that TCP/IP communications between the computers numbered 10.0.0.1 (and so on) and other computers in the Internet take place using one or more publically routable Internet addresses.
Clients in the private network must go through the address translating device(s) between the private network and the Internet to gain access to the real-time video available on the high-speed server network(s). This means that there may be multiple connections desiring real-time video and/or audio feeds through a single Internet access server, router, or other device. As a result of having this “indirect” access to the high-speed router/server network, the client provides the viewer with the real-time video/audio at non-real-time speeds.
To provide real-time access, a server may be placed behind the address translation device in the private network to receive a single stream of data and then distribute that data to other devices in the private network. Devices within the private network that attempt to access the data through a public server may be directed to the local server in the private network. To be able to direct the data communications to appropriate servers, a model of the network hierarchy is maintained. However, the address translation devices interfere with the ability to identify devices within the hierarchy.